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The ORIGINAL 1000+ Posts Club

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Meryl:




CONGRATS ON ARRIVING AT 4,000 RICH!

Penthesilea:

Congrats Rich
on 4000 posts!

MaineWriter:
Morning all,

Congratulations, Rich! 4000, woo-wee!

65 degrees this morning and a nice comfortable start to the day...

L

Penthesilea:
Can I whine a bit here today?
I just spent 286€, that's 456$, for school books for my two girls :o.
And normally, it would have even been more; three out of alltogether 21 books I already had from my older daughter. The regular costs for school books this year would have been 341€ = 542$ !!!
And next year, my little Oliver will also be a school kid :P.

I know I'm spoiled because I grew up and lived for the greatest part of my life in a federal country where all school books are loaned to the kids for free. Now I live only a few kilometers across the border in another federal state, and here the parents have to pay for the books.

Oh, and additionally to the books there are the utensils: in true, typical German small-mindedness, every teacher decides what utensils they want their pupils to use. You can't just buy some notebooks and pens and be done with it. Nooooo, no effin way! Every teacher tells you what size the notebooks have to have and what kind of kind of ruling, and if they want to have a blank border at one side or smaller blank borders at both sides, or no blank border at all, and so on. Even the color of the wrapper for the notebooks is decided by every teacher to their liking.
Arrrrrgh! That's so frustrating (and expensive). I have a list of 32 utensil items only for my younger daughter (for the older one, her teachers will tell us after the summer break, and then you have to get the stuff from one day to the next).

I hate it every year! >:(

Coming back to the (I think) horrendous costs for school books: how is the situation at public schools in the US? Do you have to pay for the books and if so, how much (rule of thumb) do you spend per year per child only on school books?

Penthesilea:
Oh, and while I'm at it, I can as well vent about the costs for the school bus! The ticket for the school bus is 378€ = 600$ a year for each child from 5th grade on.
(We have an elementary school in walking distance in our village, so no bus tickets for the first four years).

And what gets me the most is the inequitiy about the school bus costs: as many of you know, we have three different types of schools after elementary school, with three different levels of complexity and three different kinds of graduation degrees. When your child goes to the school with the lowest complexitiy level and the lowest possible graduation degree, you don't pay for the school bus at all!

How many children go to the school with the lowest level, only because their parents can't afford the 600 bucks every year? It's just not fair! >:(

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